I will be stronger. Maybe.

Over the past few weeks I’ve dropped a couple pounds. Not much, but it feels good, like getting back into fighting shape. My one and only official amateur bout, 15-plus years back, I got creamed. Went up against a golden-boy with his own embroidered uniform and cheering squad. I had on a borrowed sweaty tank top from another fighter: my own shirt wasn’t regulation cut. I never went down, but at the end of three rounds the winner was clear, and it wasn’t me.

Nowadays boxing has no mojo; all the excitement in fighting has moved over to MMA. Can you name any boxer who’s held a title in the last 10 years? Strangely, even as the sport is waning, movies about boxers just keep coming out.

The most interesting fights, of course, aren’t boxing or MMA, but ideological battles, relationship dramas, and our own internal struggles. In the ring there’s always one official (if not always undisputed) winner. Outside the ring winners are harder to peg, especially so when we fight with ourselves. If we win, then who lost?

Excess weight has never been that big of an issue for me. I struggle with other kinds of flab and decay and battle a sweet tooth for mind treats. No matter. The fight goes on, long after our prime is over, and our big fat bellies (real or symbolic) hang out, with blood stains on our frayed shirts set in for good.

Digital artwork above from Chong Roden.

by Winnie Truong. Reminds me a bit of this piece by Deveras.

by Judson Huss

In cartoon land, with very few exceptions, the young are eternally young and the old never die. Celluloid images fade in color, but never in form; the zeros and ones of a JPEG keep their youthful appearance for as long as the files stay uncorrupted.

We tend to like the iconic images of our youth untarnished, unaffected by the natural cycle of decay. I suspect that aging cartoons would ruin the nostalgia felt by some, and that the added layer of realism gives others the queasy feeling of staring into the uncanny valley.

For my own part, I would love to see an explosion in artwork depicting aged versions of cartoon characters, to compliment the untooning phenomenon.

Supposing that Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble were 25 years old when The Flintstones made their TV debut in 1960, and if time and gravity took its normal course, they would turn 76 this year and no doubt look just like illustrator Matthias Seifarth portrays them.

by Niark1. For the francophobes the title translates to “Open womb”.

In the lonely images of John Brosio, indifferent everymen pose before backdrops of impending doom and supernatural horror. Tornadoes ravage suburbs and giant shellfish wreak havoc. My favorite is the image above, titled Fatigue. Lit like a Magritte and every bit as surreal, I imagine the octopus represents the worker’s inner projection on arriving home to his domestic life. Does he really want to go inside, does he have a choice?

Obviously I haven’t been posting much recently. I’ve got a problem. Others have written before about the perils of spending all your time connected to the internet. The NADD, the ADD, the email twitch. I have a related problem. Perhaps specific to the particular way I work online, but I suspect others might be having similar issues as well….

I spend all of my time ignoring information. Scanning pages. Clicking “Next”. Deleting spam. Browsing headlines. Can I ignore this? Can I move on now? These are the questions in my mind all the time. I spend my days looking for reasons to move on as quickly as possible from every bit of information. I’m not looking for reasons to learn more, I’m looking for reasons to learn less. To remain ignorant.

In part, this way of being is defensive; there’s just so much information out there. So many images, so many stories, videos, songs. I don’t have time to examine even a thousandth of what I see to any level deeper than the grooves on your cutting board. So why not examine less but at a deeper level? Why not just pick the good stuff, the cream, the icy frosting on top of the crap-cake that is the web and savor every sweet bite?

A couple reasons. One is my day (and night) job. I look for arbitrage opportunities in semi-liquid, online-tradeable markets. “Arbitrage” is just a fancy word for buying low and selling for just a little bit more, except you do it in real time, super-quick turn around, faster than cats. These opportunities come up then disappear again within  months, weeks, or even just a few days. For every promising prospect I examine, there are thousands of apparent dead ends. The virtual world is a coal mine where some folks break their backs digging out tons of low-priced carbon; I look for the shiny stones. As I scan the walls, I want to spend as little time as possible picking at a worthless stake. Even when I think I’ve found something interesting, most of my effort goes into looking fore reasons to quit investigating. To pull back, move on.

So why bother? That one gem, that golden vein in this overworked metaphor, could be worth a whole year’s salary, maybe more. It’s happened before. It will happen again. Meanwhile, I need to keep my eyes open to everything. Take in just enough information to move on, to ignore. Or put it in the back of my head and continue along. If I keep seeing the same thing again, in different contexts, then I might decide that it’s something worth checking out.

Another reason I scan through so much, so quickly, is likely shared by many others as well. For our brains, shiny little bits of information are like any other addictive substance. We get a tiny endorphin rush with each new image, every new idea or headline. Problem is, the rush fades as quickly as it came, leaving us hungry for another quick mental snack. So we get stuck in channel-surfing mode, always looking for something new, something different. Rarely content to settle in, turn off the wandering mind and focus hard, to put down the clicker and spend the time and energy to read, to understand.

For the past few months I’ve begun to pull back from this behavior. I’ve discovered that I really can still read an entire book, or have a slow conversations, or spend hours looking at artwork. But in order to transition into that mode, I need to disconnect from the information pipeline first. No doubt I’m missing an opportunity here or there, but at the same time I’m getting back my mind, which as we all know is a terrible thing to waste, or misplace, or scramble up with toast and eggs. I might just find it useful.

Illustrations for this post are from a music poster by Kristian Hammerstad.

David Jablow has a fantastic series of Do It Yourself Doodles at flickr. They all feature the same incomplete woman completed and woven into dozens of imaginative scenes. Shown above is my favorite detail from the set.

by illustrator Guilherme Marconi.

My Darlingtonia by Madeline von Foerster.

The image above is a small detail from a much larger wallpaper image I created. Click on the image to see the full size. I wasn’t able to find any nice wallpaper graphics big enough to span my three obscenely large computer monitors, so I created one of my own. I created it with the computer language PHP and carefully tweaked the random variables until I got an effect I liked. I spend the bulk of my days on arbitrage of one sort or another, which means that I spend a lot of time looking for patterns in the noise, or more precisely I spend my time trying to get a computer to find patterns in the noise. To really understand randomness, you have to spend a lot of time faking it. The same could be said about art, perhaps, which got me thinking about the intersection of art and computing…

Is art context free? Specifically, does it change the quality a work if you know that it was created by a computer, by a child or an elephant? I’d have to say the answer to that is both Yes and No. All artwork is contextual, in that it has a place in time and space and history, and that this location has importance. Early cave art is important, even if its artistic merit is low at best. Art can tell a story, document a time period. Particular works fits in to the timeline of an artist’s life in important ways. Art can gain power from its message about the world around us, or from its connections to real-world events. So context absolutely does matter.

In terms of aesthetics, context can matter as well. In a direct way, a bad frame diminishes a great work. Blatant political overtones can turn a stunningly beautiful image into crass propaganda or it can merge beauty and message. There are artists who’ve spent decades playing in the uncomfortable spaces where gorgeous art meets two-fisted commercial and political evangelizing.

Beyond that, works can be striking or beautiful or extraordinary in their own right. Abstract art in particular has a strong non-contextual aspect. The imaginative blobs of Seurat are masterpieces of color and composition whose beauty is independent of where he fits in the pantheon of impressionist painters. Computer-assisted art can fit this description as well. The stunning creations of Ray Caesar depend on 3D computer modeling; plenty of great illustrators do their work in Illustrator.

Too much emphasis on the context behind artwork leads to incentives to cheat and package, since you can fake or manufacture context. An untold number of marginally talented artists have used context and re-contextualization to gain fame and fortune widely disproportionate to their ability to paint. Writers exploit contextual narratives as well, by claiming that their boiler-plate descent-into-drugs” novel is really a harrowing true-life memoir, or that the author is a blind autistic 12-year-old raised by wolves. Backstory is used to enhance or replace artistic merit.

I should make clear that my thoughts on context and art generation aren’t an attempt to raise up my own highly unexceptional computer-generated graphics to the level of Great Art. Someday, perhaps, computers will be able to create masterpieces with only the slightest of direct guidance from their operators. With the correct evolutionary algorithm it seems possible that there might an automated way to tease beauty out of the background noise, just as some of us work to find patterns in the data clouds.

For Connected, Kasey McMahon fabricates a networked goddess out of Ethernet cables.